Anthropic Launches Public Beta of Message Threads to Speed Up Long-Running Agents

At a glance

A public beta of a "message threads" feature is now available on the Claude platform. With it, agents no longer have to resend the entire conversation history every time. As conversations get longer, the time Claude takes to start responding goes down.

Key points

1. 1

   With threads, only content added since the last turn is sent.

2. 2

   In requests of 500k to 1M tokens, the median time to first response dropped by about 35%, according to the company.

3. 3

   Threads expire five minutes after the last request, and after that the full conversation must be sent again.

4. 4

   Requests get smaller, but token usage stays the same because Claude reads the full conversation on every turn.

Why it matters

For tasks like coding agents that send hundreds of requests in one job, this can greatly reduce waiting time for responses.